I never thought one of them could be so different that she’d decide to marry the most boring man in Britain. And yet here we were, all off to Claridge’s to say ‘Cheers!’ because Mia had declared that was where she wanted the wedding in less than four months’ time. It seemed quick, as if she wanted to lock Hugo down as fast as possible, but Mia said winter weddings were more ‘chic’ than summer weddings. She would have berries in her flower arrangement and mulled wine at the reception. Her head was full of these intricate details. She’d also already decided that Ruby and I would be her bridesmaids so I gloomily anticipated wearing something the colour of sick.
All of us were going to Claridge’s that night, apart from my father, that is, since he was the British ambassador to Argentina and for the past six years had lived in an Edwardian mansion in Buenos Aires. He couldn’t fly home for the dinner, he’d apologetically emailed me to explain, because he had a meeting with one of Argentina’s biggest soybean exporters.
If Dad was back, I’d be rolling along the pavement with a bounce. Although we emailed every couple of weeks (I’d update him on new history books; he’d send me back brief updates, mostly about the weather), I missed his physical presence and wished he was closer, more in my life. However, the soybean magnate took precedence and so, gathered that night would be me, the happy couple, Patricia and Ruby. So long as she showed up. Ruby – blessed with the cheekbones of Kate Moss and breasts of a Barbie doll – was a model. Or trying to be a model. She’d been signed to an agent for a few years but had only been cast in magazine adverts for washing powder and toothpaste. Recently she’d been asked by Senokot, the constipation brand, to star in a series of posters for the Tube but turned them down. ‘You’d never catch Kylie Jenner doing that, Flo,’ she’d declared in the kitchen at home.
Still, she thought of herself as a ‘creative artist’, which meant she seemed to operate on a different timescale to the rest of us, as if time was a bourgeois construct she didn’t need to bother with.
One Christmas, Ruby didn’t come home until long after we’d finished the turkey, by which point Patricia was halfway down a bottle of Bailey’s and demanding that Dad use one of his government contacts to find out where she was. This far-fetched idea was forgotten when Ruby waltzed through the door sometime after five, claiming that her phone battery had died, the buses weren’t working and her credit card had been stopped which, in turn, meant that her Uber account was frozen. ‘Oh my poor darling,’ Patricia had slurred, clasping Ruby to her chest. ‘We must get you another credit card. Henry? HENRY! Can you order Ruby another card?’
I shook my head again. Patricia would almost certainly overdo it that night, ordering bottle after bottle of champagne, and the only topic of conversation would be the wedding. At home in Kennington, there’d been little discussion of anything else since Mia returned from Puglia, flicking her engagement ring about the kitchen like a knuckle-duster. It was ‘the wedding’ this and ‘the wedding’ that, as if there’d never been a wedding in history before, nor would be after it. Should Ruby or I ever choose to get married ourselves, I imagined that Mia’s wedding would still be referred to as ‘the wedding’ in our family. Not that this was likely, I reminded myself.
Because although I was thirty-two and had two arms, two legs and a face with its features in vaguely the right places (I hated my thin upper lip), I’d never had a boyfriend. Never been in love. True, there’d been a five-week fling at Edinburgh when I’d fallen for a second-year history student called Rich. But I’d ruined this by being too keen. I’d assumed after our first night together that he was my boyfriend, not realizing that Rich thought otherwise. He kept sneaking into my halls at 2, 3 and 4 a.m. during those brief first weeks when I’d found myself bewitched by a man for the first time, but there was a Thursday evening not long afterwards when my friend Sarah said she’d seen him snogging another girl in the Three Witches. I plucked up the courage to text him about it and Rich replied ‘What are you, my wife?’ The pain was so intense and sharp I felt like a small child who’d stuck their finger into a flame. That was the end of Rich.
I’d had precisely three very short flings since, one-night stands really, although I didn’t realize they were one-night stands at the time. You don’t, do you? I thought each one might be the start of something. Perhaps this one would finally be my boyfriend? Or the next one? Or the one after that? But they never morphed into boyfriends and I never fell in love because, after sleeping with me, they never texted or called me back. I’d tried to pretend I didn’t care after that.
No point in boyfriends, I told myself, when newspapers and magazines were full of women grumbling about relationships. ‘Dear Suzy, my boyfriend wants me to talk dirty every time we have sex and I’ve run out of vocabulary. What do you advise?’ Or ‘Dear Suzy, my husband always puts the empty milk carton back into the fridge instead of the bin. Should I divorce him?’ If I ever wrote a letter like this, I would ask ‘Dear Suzy, I’m thirty-two and I’ve never been in love but I’m pretty happy with life, although I still live with my sisters and I have a couple of weird habits. Sometimes I think not having a boyfriend by my age makes me strange, but can you ever tell in advance if someone’s going to hurt you?’
I stopped on the pavement and looked up at the façade of Claridge’s for a quick pep talk. Listen up, Florence Fairfax, this is going to be a cheerful evening and you will smile throughout. You will not look as sombre as if you’re at your own funeral because your sister is marrying a man who judges others by their golf handicap. You will sound convincing when everyone clinks glasses. You will not count every mouthful. Get it together.
I glanced at my feet and realized I’d forgotten the heels I’d carried into work that morning in a plastic Boots bag and I’d have to wear my work shoes instead. Black, with velcro straps and a thick rubber sole, they were the sort of shoes you see advertised for elderly men in the back of Sunday supplements. I wore them because I spent all day on my feet working in a Chelsea bookshop. Who cared if I looked like an escapee from a retirement home? I was mostly behind the till or a table piled with hardbacks. Except now I had to attend Mia’s celebratory dinner at Claridge’s looking like someone who’d had a recent bunion operation and been issued a pair of orthopaedic shoes.
Hopefully nobody would notice. I smiled at the doorman standing beside the hotel entrance in his top hat and pushed through the revolving door into the lobby.
‘Florence darling, what on earth have you got on your feet?’ Patricia asked, loudly enough for several other tables to hear. Mia and Hugo were already there.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, leaning down to kiss my stepmother on the cheek. ‘Left my other shoes in the shop.’
‘Well sit down quickly and nobody will see them,’ Patricia carried on, nodding at an empty chair. ‘I’ve ordered some champagne.’ She was a woman with birdlike features – hooked nose, beady eyes – who minded about the wrong shoes and the right champagne very much. Twenty-five years earlier, she’d joined the civil service as a secretary called Pat and observed that those who progressed quickest seemed to be in a secret club. They wore the same suits and had the same accents. They talked about tennis as if it was a religion, not just a sport. She very much wanted to be part of that club, so she saved up to buy a suit from Caroline Charles, upgraded from ‘Pat’ to ‘Patricia’ and stopped saying toilet. She clocked my father as a target. He was a grieving widower whose wife had recently been killed in a car crash and was talked of as a rising star in the department. Patricia moved in quickly. Marrying someone from this club would guarantee entry into it.
Within a year, Dad had proposed and she was living in our Kennington house. I was three and seemed to have observed these changes in my life in bewildered silence. Mia came along another year on, which meant I was bumped from my first-floor bedroom up a flight into a new room which overlooked the street. Ruby was born the year after that, and I ascended into the attic.
‘Hi, guys,’ I said, standing over Mia and Hugo. Their heads were both bent to the table; Mia was